April 2009 : Out of Control

Don’t worry. This isn’t some negative trope
about “these kids today” with their Facebooks and iPhones. This is
about some of your colleagues, who are out of control in the best sense
of the phrase.

I recently restarted the Tech & Learning
Twitter account (techlearning for those of you who tweet) and was
astounded by the amounts of information, interaction, and innovation
being transferred, all in a medium that demands 140 text characters or
fewer. For the uninitiated: Twitter users post messages to an online
personal profile through the Web or by sending text messages. Other
users choose to follow your words of wisdom and can reply with another
“tweet” or by sending you a direct message. Likewise, you can choose to
follow and respond to what other users are writing. That’s all there is
to it.

And yet, what at
first seems like a trivial pursuit has become a powerful
professional-development tool for edtech integrators. As I type, tweets
from Tech & Learning advisor David Warlick [dwarlick] are scrolling
down from Doha, Qatar: “Preparing for workshop tomorrow. German soap
opera playing in the background. Very strange...” Curriculum director
Patrick Higgins [pjhiggins] is contemplating cooperative learning in
schools at the ASCD conference: “The person doing the talking is the
person doing the learning.” Wes Fryer [wfryer] points to his blog notes
on installing a virtual version of Sugar (read our Q&A with Sugar’s
founder, Walter Bender, on page 16).

To be honest, it’s all a
bit too much to handle, which basically justifies my job: sharing with
you the increasingly out-of-control developments in education and
technology. Keep reading the magazine, and join us online at
techlearning.com to discover what we find.